Welcome to COMM 395: Social Media Wednesdays Course Wiki!

The Social Media Wednesdays Wiki embodies what Howard Rheingold (2007) has referred to as "an exercise in creating useful public goods." The purpose of this site is to serve as an educational resource (a “public good”) for all members of COMM 395 and the greater online community (the “public”) around critical issues pertaining to the study of social media tools, technologies and cultures.
The two main projects featured on this site include:
  • Our class Wikinotes, in which students contribute to the "collective intelligence" of the classroom community by collaboratively annotating and synthesizing each week's course material;
  • The Social Media Literacy Project, a semester-long research assignment in which students introduce theoretically-informed critiques of specific social media sites. The ultimate goal of these research projects is to help empower users to make better, more informed decisions about social media tools and websites, by revealing how they might afford or delimit certain social, cultural, economic and political possibilities.
    • This semester, students will be researching:
      • ChristianSingles, an online Christian dating site
      • FourSquare, a geolocational service that allows for check-ins, reviews, coupons and mobile social networking
      • Google +, a social networking site
      • Match.com, an online dating website for singles
      • Tumblr,a [micro] blogging website for posting multi-media content that can be reblogged by "followers"
Feel free to look around and make suggestions, we hope you'll find the site to be a valuable resource!